The Whispering Swarm (16 page)

I was a great Mervyn Peake fan and publicised his work whenever I could. I had known Peake for a couple of years and his health was failing but we all held hope for his recovery. I didn't really think of his work as fantasy. To me he was closer to absurdists like Peacock and Firbank or Maurice Richardson, whom Allard also loved. Peake had a better sense of narrative than any of them but his grotesque Dickensian characters dominated his work. There was nothing supernatural about it. Some people called it Gothic, I think because it was set in a brooding castle, while others compared him to Kafka or even Lovecraft. Peake was a vorticist with a sense of humour. But manifestos weren't his thing as I'd discovered as I came to know him.
Gormenghast
was an intensely personal response to the world, eschewing movements yet having much in common with the surrealists or even the pataphysicians. I'd never read
Lord of the Rings
which seemed a somewhat reactionary response to the modern, having much in common with Germanic folklore and most American SF, and probably the secret of its success. There was something about Tolkien's comfy, conspiratorial tone which reminded me of the
Daily Mail,
BBC
Children's Hour
or Winnie the Pooh, and actually repelled me.

I found my heroic fantasy masters in the pulps, old and new. They were almost all American. Robert E. Howard was their king and Fritz Leiber the most literary. I loved Jack Vance's
Dying Earth
and Frank Owen's strange pseudo-orientalism. I struggled a bit with James Branch Cabell but enjoyed Lord Dunsany. Lovecraft and horror fiction in general had no attractions. Lovecraft's contemporary, Seabury Quinn, who was his greatest rival in
Weird Tales,
was much more to my taste. Allard had no interest in any pulp but
Black Mask
.
Galaxy
was his favourite contemporary SF magazine, as it was mine. No spaceships. Lots of dystopias. I don't think either of us read the other when we weren't doing something unusual, but we pretended we had. For me literature had to be thoroughly stunning (like Eliot) or pleasantly numbing (like Sexton Blake stories). My enthusiasm for SF faded when so little of it was exciting. I wasn't interested in middlebrow or middle-class tastes. That was what kept us friends, our lust for the excellent and the extraordinary. And Barry read everything we did, as I read his. He and I even wrote a few stories together, the most ambitious of which anticipated miniature computers and M-theory as well as largely metaphysical worlds and ideas. We had the most intense intellectual conversations and then earned our bread as best we could by writing Gothics for the comics. Allard remained editing his trade magazine but flirted with the idea of selling an SF novel to the US and getting a thousand dollars, enough to chuck in his job, as long as he worked rapidly. Barry and I wrote mostly educational stuff for
Look and Learn, Did You Know?,
and
Bible Story
and every so often I did another Meg Midnight story for Fleetway.

Dave Gregory at AP soon wanted more ‘historicals' as these costume melodramas were called, so I came up with
The Phantom Cavalier
: a cloaked and hooded vigilante before the Restoration. Remembering Claude Duval I made my hero an exile from France and a loyal servant of the Stuart Cause, so that many of his adventures could be lifted whole from Stevenson, with a few tweaks, reversing the political polarities, setting them in Cromwellian England and making them over-the-top romances in the spirit of the ‘bloods' I began to search out in second hand bookshops.

The bloods had titles like
The Blue Dwarf
and
Colonel Jack, The Gentleman Highwayman, The Brotherhood of the Heath
or
Black Bess
—dozens of them. The Gothic was one of the most popular genres of the nineteenth century and I revived the writing of it single-handed, to be lauded as something of an innovator in the world of comics and fantasy fiction. I saw that stuff as directly in the Gothic tradition. Doing a great deal of lucrative hack work, I was still in a slightly uncertain position, since freelancing, while well paid, was unpredictable. At that point—1959—Bill Baker asked me to come and work on his editorial team. I liked the idea. Keeping a steady ten-to-five editing job and, with luck, selling the odd feature would give me time to take a crack at a proper novel. But I couldn't write a novel until the rent was paid, and the freelance work could always dry up without warning. The editorial job on Sexton Blake Library solved my dilemma. Really, I was just delighted at the chance to work on the last of the AP story papers!

So of course I took the job. In loyalty to my younger self, if nothing else. It was my last dream come true! And the work scarcely proved to be arduous! Bill explained that, because there wasn't really a full-time job on Blake and because of my experience with type and text layouts, I would also be doing some other editorial work, mostly on the annuals. These were hardcover versions of the weekly comics. I found I could write a good many text stories and some comics when not doing editorial work, and be paid good rates for them. The annuals paid more. It was all pretty easy work after the one-man band I'd been on a weekly magazine. The surrounding offices were crammed with young editors, all with enormous literary ambition. They were my professors. They loved lecturing me. They knew all kinds of stuff: foreign films, untranslated literary masters, obscure English writers and painters. With my patchy cultural background, I brought out the worst as well as the best in them, but they were great enthusiasts and hugely well educated. Having started so young as an editor, I was at least three or four years their junior. New Fleetway House was my university.

Soon after I got the editing job, Dave wanted to know if I could give him two more Meg Midnight stories a week—one in text for
Tiger
and the other a strip in
Lion,
the new versions of
Sun
and
Comet—
to see which form was going to be the more popular. I agreed, even though they'd already reprinted one of my long stories as a serial, with a bulked-up Turpin in place of Moll. They also turned her into first Turpin's girl pal then Jack o' Justice's girl pal, who loved investigating the paranormal. The department head, Len Matthews, had earlier created his own girl highway robber who had not been as successful as Meg, but he seemed perfectly happy with my version. She had settled into the role she would make her own. My
The Haunted Blade
sold twice as many as any other issue of Thriller Picture Library. This was a big break for me, since Fleetway generally paid much better and quicker than any of the other publishers. I was rather relieved they'd taken my rejigged character back into the fold.

Memphis went on a cruise with her grandmother and I briefly went back to seeing Sandy. Mr Gupta seemed to like me. He saw me as young, ambitious and destined to be a good breadwinner. He started talking about marriage. I was already the son he'd never had. So that was the end of my association with that family. Their upper-class assumptions and opinions had become increasingly hard to take anyway.

By now, of course, I completely blamed LSD for what had happened in ‘Alsacia'. Life was getting very full for me and Alsacia had dropped below my horizon. I talked about it sometimes, but only to illustrate the power of LSD to create hallucinations.

By 1959 I had written, with Jim, the Sexton Blake story I always wanted to do and was working regularly for the British SF magazines. I was also still in Killing Floor, a skiffle group-cum-blues band. But now I was more into Carter than Cash. I played banjo and sang some Guthrie songs, which I quickly discovered wasn't sexy, even though I wasn't bad at it. I went through a bluegrass phase. I bought a Gretsch guitar on hire purchase payments but kept the G tuning, dropping a string so I could carry on fingering the same as the banjo. I wasn't bad. Slide guitar is pretty easy with that tuning and gave Woody some beaty phrasing. I could stop a show with ‘Pretty Boy Floyd' or ‘This Land is Your Land'. People said I put real emotion into my singing. For a year or more we earned a bit of money on the side doing small gigs, pubs and dances, briefly becoming a C&W band before we morphed into The Big Six, a moddy R&B band doing Chicago blues and Chuck Berry hits. Your influences and your tastes change rapidly when you're young. It was a familiar route.

In those preswinging days everyone seemed to wear grey. It was when I first understood fashion as not just a passing Ted thing. We had Italian suits, rayon, pale grey bum-freezer jackets, overcoats to the knee, Italian shoes, short pudding-bowl haircuts. Slender, knitted ties, sharp collar and cuffs. Earlier, as when I first dressed up to meet Moll Midnight, I wore a buff pullover, corduroy bags, chukka boots and a duffel coat identifying me as a beatnik. My only touch of originality was the black ex-army ski cap on my head. I wore it because it represented Woody Guthrie's railroad-man's hat. There's a picture of me at
Tarzan
wearing it! Later Bob Dylan would put on much the same outfit. I wrote to Woody. Woody wrote back. But Bob made the physical pilgrimage.

Later we changed to black. Cool blokes wore black. Black car coat, tight charcoal trousers, Cuban-heeled pointed shoes, old-fashioned detachable white collars and shirts with links, showing a fair bit of cuff below the sleeve. Early mod my children call it. For a while it was The Who, Faces, The Action and us. Can you guess who didn't get a record deal?

Through the late '50s we performed in Soho venues like Bunjies, Sam Widges, The Skiffle Cellar, The Gyre and Gimble at Charing Cross and The Nucleus in St Martin's Lane, just across from the As You Like It where John Baldry and Reg Dwight used to go. Both of them could belt out blues in those days. I was with John when we met Willie Dixon. John was at least a couple of inches taller than me. Known as Long John, he could belt out blues better than any of us. Now we were on the Rik Gunnell circuit, playing the Flamingo
,
the Railway Hotel and Eel Pie Island. And Moll rode on, to almost impossible popularity in the years when WW II's
Battler Britton
was taking over everything except soccer. I've often wondered how things would have gone with the band if I'd been able to put my whole talent behind it.

Amongst my writer colleagues there weren't many I bonded with, apart from my closest friends Allard, Barry, Pete and Max Stone. Allard, as noted, was of an older generation and tone deaf as well. A bit suspicious of ‘
yoof'
. Max the dandy had become a cartoonist and an outstanding Django-style guitarist. He could play anything. Pete played what he called classical washboard. Barry had become self-conscious and dropped out, taking his harmonica with him. With Max on guitar we had a nifty little trio with me on bass, sometimes doing banjo where appropriate.

Max and Barry had been in the RAF together and were a year or two older than me. I had just escaped the call-up by a month or so. Originally we had met at the Globe because we had an interest in science fiction. The pub was only a street or two from my mum's house. I was still looking to science fiction as a means of confronting what were particularly contemporary problems.

Jack, confined as a child when the Germans invaded Guernsey, had innocently given his father up to the authorities when an avuncular German officer asked whose dads had radios. He had what some thought a skewed view of the world. Admirers of his short stories (he had yet to write a novel) said he was something close to a genius. I was, needless to say, an admirer. I had known nothing as terrifying as a German camp, but had come through the Blitz and the V-bombs.

We were not concerned like the middle classes with shivering at the future and seeing doom in every scientific development. We embraced all innovation. We weren't even standard bohemians, wanting to ban the bomb. Allard had seen the bomb as a sign of release from the appalling cruelty of the Germans and Japanese. Bayley wondered about its philosophical meaning and symbolism, while I, who had experienced so many V-rockets and known friends who disappeared suddenly as a result of those explosions, did not feel especially bothered about a lethal instrument which took you out instantaneously. So while progressives marched with the CND, we were inclined not to. The beneficiaries of most wars were the survivors. That's how we saw ourselves. Fortunate.

When we did march it was to please our friends. The experience sharpened our sense of what lay in store for us should our democracies break down, both politically and socially. John Brunner, with his goatee, yellow stock and corduroy sports jacket, was very disappointed in us. I knew his inner RAF officer was tempted to order us to volunteer. Instead he forced a smile and said our hearts were in the right places. That wasn't true, either. Turning his back on his earlier romanticism, Allard was developing his bleak, existential parables of contemporary life. Influenced by the English absurdists and French existentialists, I was thinking about a character looking for a contemporary urban identity, who could relish and examine what most people considered the nightmares of the present and near future, who even took being a fictional character for granted. Bayley considered the most grotesque notions and imagined their logical outcome. Of the three of us, he was the most interested in using science fiction to examine and formulate ideas in theoretical physics. We had proven that we could suspend disbelief with the best of them. Now the trick was how to
retain
disbelief. We were strong on theories of alienation in those days. I loved Brecht. Allard found his inspiration in Freud. His work was becoming that mixture of austere romanticism which out-Greened Greene and was totally idiosyncratic. Max took to writing lyrics. And, eventually, jingles.

We still dreamed of creating a glossy magazine, about the dimensions of
Playboy,
which would run features and fiction, all examining the world around us. We needed to find forms carrying the maximum number of narratives. We needed art paper so that we could reproduce modern paintings, photographs and good illustrations. We would use photomontage for some of those features. As viable literature we had to compete with and pinch from film and television for an audience's attention. It was not for us to bemoan the ‘death of literature'; it was for us to stay alive and create new ways of attracting audiences by embracing their anxieties and examining their nightmares while offering them unfamiliar forms and unconventional elements which at the same time embraced all the methods we saw around us and were still rarely considered respectable literary forms. We were hugely idealistic and had no practical understanding of how to fund such a venture. But talk was good enough for those days. And I had my new girlfriend.